In February 1948 Georgie wrote to Harry: “I am open to any and almost all trips. That is what I live for and one summer to the next certainly seems long. Does it to you?”1

Over the next few months Georgie and Harry made plans to go down the Escalante River. They arrived at the small town of Escalante in southern Utah on May 24 and bought provisions for the trip. Both the town and river are named for Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante of the Domínguez-Escalante expedition of 1776. Oddly, Escalante neither saw nor came close to the river bearing his name. Major Powell also floated past its mouth on both his 1869 and 1871 explorations of the Colorado River unaware that it was a major tributary. A year later in 1872 the Thompson-Dellenbaugh survey party at first took it for the Dirty Devil, then realizing their error, took credit for its discovery. It proved to be the last river to be discovered in the contiguous United States.2 Even at this time in 1948, very few Anglos had traveled down the Escalante.

A few years ago, some enterprising animal lover brought a Vietnamese miniature pot-bellied pig into this country. Being only a few weeks old, it was cute and everybody wanted one. More of the babies were brought in and people paid several hundred dollars for the little black charmers. Then they started to grow up. One of my Idaho horse customers, the finest person I’ve ever known, but who should have known better, bought two of them. If they had both been females or males, things would have eventually worked out all right, but they were a couple, a male and a female, entirely capable of reproducing themselves.

Before I get on with the story of Chester, let me describe what an adult Vietnamese miniature pot-bellied pig can look like. The female in this story, still alive, is so fat she can’t move. She probably weighs eight or nine hundred pounds. If she were ever to raise her head, you wouldn’t be able to see her eyes because they’re buried in layers of fat. She probably couldn’t stand up, even if she wanted to, because her belly is so huge that her feet wouldn’t reach the ground. They’d probably just wiggle in the air like they were sticking out of her sides. Fortunately she is now so obese that the male can’t figure out how to impregnate her, which is good, because she just squashes all her babies anyway. All, that is, except for Chester.

Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Tabuk, Tabuk Saudi

Arabia

Abstract

The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss have sparked a serious debate during recent times. However, significant advances have been made in exploring the relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem processes, unravelling the underlying mechanisms. Soil microbes have key roles in nutrient cycling, soil formation and plant interactions. These roles are vital to ecosystem processes and biodiversity. Therefore, this chapter aims to discuss the relation of soil microbes in determining biodiversity and ecosystem processes.

14.1 Introduction

In recent times, one of the major challenges to the ecosystem is the disappearance of biodiversity.

Ecosystem and biodiversity are strongly linked to each other where growing anthropogenic alteration of the ecosystem has slowly converted them into an almost defunct system. This unparalleled loss of biodiversity has created unease over the ramifications for the precise functioning of the ecosystem

Growing your own food—whether you live in an urban, a suburban, or a rural area—can be a liberating process. When you grow your own food, the connections you make to the planet are tangible. During World Wars I and II, Americans were encouraged to start small gardens called “Victory Gardens.” These gardens were designed to help provide food for citizens during the war since many agricultural workers had been drafted.1 We can adapt this approach to fit our present times, when people are looking for healthy organic food at low cost.

Some of the best spaces for growing food happen to be in the suburbs. Take, for example, a family in Brookfield, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. It’s a nice town with nice people. Some of these nice people are the Ashrafs—the family of my wife, Fatima. They fit the profile the Pew and Gallup polls use to characterize the Muslim American community—well educated, middle-class, and mainstream. They also maintain a Green Deen, living as stewards (khalifah) of the Earth and cultivating the land available to them by keeping a backyard garden.

Several years ago in early June, WRR received a call from one of the San Antonio Fire Departments. In the process of extinguishing an apartment fire, someone had noticed a raccoon trying to escape from the crawl space in the attic. The firefighters had to concentrate on the fire and the human inhabitants of the building, but they wanted to save the raccoon as well. So they called WRR.

When I arrived on the scene, the fire chief on duty met me in the parking lot, immediately took me to a back stairway and escorted me to the attic. There was thick smoke in the building and a portion of the stairs had been scorched, but all in all it was safe, and it was the only way to reach the stranded animal. Once I was there I was able to see that the raccoon had indeed been burned. She was suffering from smoke inhalation as well; she was coughing, confused and having trouble walking. In only a matter of minutes I secured her in a small carrier and was driving her to see one of our veterinarians.

The 3.5 million acres of Big Thicket country are laced with roads and dotted with cities, villages, and farms (see map 1). Much of it has been bulldozed to bare dirt and planted with pine farms or has been altered so radically that little is left that could qualify for preservation. Also, the economy of Southeast Texas is wholly dependent on forest products and taking a too-large portion of the land out of timber production would cause economic distress in an already economically depressed area.

Recommendations were made for the preservation of areas from

10,000 to 300,000 acres at different times. The history of efforts to secure a Big Thicket Preserve is not covered in this work for it is dealt with in other publications, such as James J. Cozine Jr.’s Saving the Big

Thicket (University of North Texas Press, 2004). Eventually, in 1974 all interested parties compromised and a bill was passed in Congress setting aside a National Preserve of 84,550 acres in nine widely separated units and three stream corridors (see map 7).

THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY EXCITING TIME to study the behavior of other animals. It seems like every day we’re learning more and more about the fascinating lives of other animals — how smart and clever they are and how they’re able to solve problems we never imagined they could. Here I consider a wide range of research on animals that shows clearly just how well-developed and amazing are their cognitive skills. A very few people continue to ignore what we really know about other animals, but they are in the vast minority. Here you can read about flies, bees, lizards, fish, a back-scratching dog, how climate change is influencing behavior, and why respected scientists are pondering the spiritual lives of animals.

However, before getting into this wonderful research on animal minds and consciousness, I start this part with an essay that tackles one of the main and enduring criticisms of such research and of my work in particular: anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals, objects, or events (such as when people talk about “nasty thunderstorms.” The charge of anthropomorphism is often used to bash ideas that other animals are emotional beings. Skeptics claim that dogs, for example, are merely acting “as if” they’re happy or sad, but they really aren’t; they might be feeling something we don’t know or feeling nothing at all. Skeptics propose, because we can’t know with absolute certainty the thoughts of another being, we should take the stance that we can’t know anything or even that consciousness in other animals doesn’t exist. For Psychology Today and elsewhere, I have written extensively about the “problem” of “being anthropomorphic.” For instance, see “Anthropomorphic Double-Talk” in my book The Emotional Lives of Animals (see Endnotes, page 335). In my opinion, there’s no way to avoid anthropomorphism. Even those who eschew anthropomorphism must make their arguments using anthropomorphic terms, and they often do so in self-serving ways. If a scientist says an animal is “happy,” no one questions it, but if the animal is described as sad or suffering, then charges of anthropomorphism are leveled. Scientists can accept and treat their own companion animals as if they feel love, affection, gratitude, and pain, and then deny these very emotions in the animals they use, and abuse, while conducting experiments in the lab.

As we celebrate each anniversary of helping animals, it is natural to look back, to remember animals both human and non-human, to reﬂect on why some things happened, to mourn, to be thankful, and to plan ahead.

Wildlife Rescue is evolving into the very organization that I had always dreamed it would. I remember well those difﬁcult days in the late 1970s when all WRR could do was manage to exist day to day, but always present was the very real dream of a beautiful 200–acre sanctuary. Now we are literally living and building that dream. But, as with so many things in life, along with dreams and plans there are often aspects of sadness. Growth and change are funny things. We usually look forward to them, fear them, get excited about them, welcome them, and dread them all at the same time. But one thing is certain: with life comes change and with change, if we are wise, comes growth.

The most important component of Wildlife Rescue is that we save the lives of animals who otherwise would most likely perish. Many of the animals we care for are brought to us by people who found them in dire need of help, hit by a car, poisoned, or trapped. Some are found motherless, lying on the ground waiting to die; then there are those who are left at our gate, tied there with a note, hoping that we will help. This was how Macy the Dog came our way.

Back when movies were black and white and talkies hadn’t yet been invented, one of the nation’s most promising movie production companies was Chicago’s Essanay Studio, and one of its filming locations was along the remote lakeshore in northwest Indiana. The dunes made a perfect backdrop for at least a few of Essanay’s films. The lake, after all, did quite nicely for ocean scenes, and the beach and dunes could easily become deserts. A bonus was that the dunes were still open and rather empty of homes.

In 1912, Essanay used the dunes at Miller for the The Conquest of Mexico, the motion picture spectacular of its day. It was thus at the north end of Lake Street that 160 faux Spaniards led by Hernando Cortez landed on the beach. There they encountered numerous faux Aztecs and their emperor Montezuma, whom they soundly defeated (while dozens of Miller residents looked on from the tops of nearby dunes).

With no hotels in the area, ten Pullman cars sitting on a siding near the Miller Station housed the actors for the week. Many of the “extras” were students from Chicago’s Art Institute who enjoyed a Duneland vacation while being paid a dollar a day.

A number of coastal settings are present in Mexico, both in the Pacific Ocean, to the west, and in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea to the east, comprising a total length of 10,554 km of frontal coast open to the sea. With the coastal lagoons and islands, this totals about 24,945 km of coastline (Ortiz Pérez and De La Lanza 2006). These shorelines, to a greater or lesser extent, are subject to the rise in mean sea level, which will cause mostly irreversible modifications in coastal genesis and morphology, the expression of natural ecosystem landscapes, and substantial socioeconomic effects in local populations.

Mexico’s Gulf of Mexico coastline extends approximately 2775 km with an additional 4900 km of shoreline along inland water bodies that are protected by low sandy barriers. The coastal plain varies from 15 to 30 km wide and is cut by more than 25 important rivers and 23 lagoons of variable size. The terrestrial geomorphic processes, mainly fluvial, lacustrine, and swamp, as well as the littoral morphodynamics, have resulted in a complex interactive system of different transitional types among barrier islands, fluvial mouths, deltas, and estuaries that are closely linked to flood plains, lagoons, salt marshes associated with mangroves, marshes, and mangrove forests (Ortiz Pérez et al. 1996).

Drawn by Sebastián Tambusso from several sources, especially the Paleobiology Database (http://paleodb.org/).

North America also had a varied mammalian fauna during the late Tertiary and Quaternary, and its importance for understanding the Lujanian in South America has to be emphasized because the connections between the two continents are strong and relevant to our main subject. The South American faunas certainly made their mark in North America, but there were numerous other interesting creatures. The reasons for northern diversity were partly due to continued migration and evolution of forms of Eurasian origin and the arrival of the South American mammals, as well as indigenous evolution in North America. The megafauna was spectacular here as well, and like that of Pleistocene South America, it easily surpassed that of modern Africa. The period of interest to us, in North American land mammal ages, spans part of the Hemphillian (pronounced Hemp-hillian; from 10.3–4.9 Mya), plus the Blancan (4.9–1.8 Mya), Irvingtonian (1.8–0.3 Mya), and Rancholabrean (0.3–0.011 Mya), as seen in Fig. 4.1.

The impact of early agriculture on the environment is constantly discussed and researched by ecologists, yet that of hunting, while of less significance than the more invasive effects of farming, is rarely considered. Nevertheless, throughout the historical era, hunting has influenced the natural environment, and especially woodland, to a greater extent than is often imagined; and its impact remains very significant today. About 33% of Europe is covered in woodlands and much of this is still used for hunting, even in reserves (Broekmeyer et al.,

1993). To understand this potent influence, we need to consider the ways in which early hunting led to the development of the medieval forestes (royal or noble hunting grounds enshrined in forest law), and from there to the modern hunting reserve.

9.2 Early Impacts of Hunting

The concept of a wildwood evolving after the ice retreated from Europe, which remained pristine and unaffected by humans until the first farmers made their impact during the Neolithic era, is an oversimplification (Kirby and